which got me thinking about all this again (it’s a real mind-worm this one)…

So, now the scales have dropped from my eyes, let’s try again: what we are really doing is using a rough approximation to log2(n), represented as a fixed point number, that happens to be easily computed from the floating point representation. Once we have our approximate log (and exp) function, we can do the the usual computations of roots etc. using normal arithmetic operations on our fixed point representation, before converting back to a float using our exp function.

So, take a number, 2n(1+m) where 0<=m<1, a reasonable approximation to log2(x) is n+m, and we can improve the approximation by adding a small constant offset, σ and, because we are doing this in the fixed point realm, everything works out nicely when we convert back to the floating point realm. Here is a picture for n=0, choosing by eye a value of σ = 0.045:

Now, if interpret a non-negative IEEE-754 float 2n(1+m) as a 9.23 fixed point value (ie. with 9 bits to the left of the binary point, 23 bits to the right), then this fixed point number is (e+m), where e = n+127, and, as above, this is approximates log2(2e(1+m)), so e-127+m = n+m is an approximation to log2(2e-127(1+m)) = log2(2n(1+m)), ie. log2 of our original number. Note that e+m is always positive, but e+m-127 may not be, so might need to be represented as a signed value.

As far as actual code goes, first we need to be able to get at the bitwise representation of floats. It’s nice to avoid aliasing issues etc. by using memcpy; my compiler (gcc 4.4.3) at least generates sensible code for this:

Calculating (c>>1) + c we get 0x5f375c29, satisfyingly close to the original magic constant 0x5f3759df…

We can use signed or unsigned fixed point numbers for our logs, the arithmetic will be the same, providing we can avoid overflow, so for example, if to get an approximate value for log(factorial(50)), we can do:

giving the result 213.844, comparing nicely to the true result of 214.208. Note that if I were to have used a signed value for fact, the result would have overflowed.

Be warned, this is only a very rough approximation to the log2 function, only use it if a very crude estimate is good enough, or if you are going do some further refinement of the value. Alternatively, your FPU almost certainly uses some variation of this technique to calculate logs (or at least an initial approximation) so you could just leave it to get on with it.

Like many things, this isn’t particularly new, the standard reference is: